California

On July 31 the Santa Barbara News-Press published the letter to the editor by Santa Barbara restauranteur and Power Line reader Kevin Boss. For the reasons Steve suggests in the adjacent post, we think his letter is generally applicable and deserves the widest circulation. Mr. Boss writes: This month, our elected City Council representatives spent quite a bit of time and energy deciding to end the scourge of plastic straws. »

You may have heard that an initiative to split California into three states had qualified for the November ballot. It is the brainchild of Tim Draper, one of the founders of Netflix, and a couple other successful tech startups before that. Whether the idea could actually happen would require action from Congress, and I doubt there is much appetite to expand the number of U.S. Senators by four, regardless of »

I perked up at bit last night during Brett Kavanaugh’s remarks at the White House when he said, “I am part of the vibrant Catholic community in DC.” This may have been a deliberate shout out to the social conservatives who are disappointed that the nomination didn’t go to Amy Coney Barrett, whom Sen. Dianne Feinstein slurred with her infamous comment that “The dogma lives loudly with in you.” But »

Ho do you wreck one of the most beautiful cities in the world? Simple: turn it over to “progressive” government. The latest out of San Francisco is this cheery story (avert your gaze now if you’re squeamish about raw sewage): ’20 pounds of human waste’ dropped on San Francisco street corner A foul odor permeated from a massive bag of human excrement sludge left on a street corner in San »

Remember that blue wave tsunami coming to wipe out Republicans in the mid-term elections? Well, it seems to have hit a sandbar far from shore. First, the “generic ballot” of which party voters prefer for Congress has suddenly swung in favor of Republicans, following months of a slowly but steadily narrowing lead for Democrats. The newest poll, from Reuters (generally thought to be without any possible Republican bias—see chart below), »

The latest news out of California is that the state has actually achieved a budget surplus that is billions larger than expected—$3.8 billion more than forecast back in January. Good times for the spend-happy state legislature, and the next Democratic governor who will love to be able to pass out goodies upon taking office next January. As the Sacramento Bee comments: “It’s an irresistible pot of money for lawmakers who »

Not sure whether this item deserves to be filed under “California’s Suicide” or our “Green Weenie” category. Apparently California’s governing class thinks the cost of housing isn’t high enough, because the state government has just mandated that all new housing starting in 2020 must come with rooftop solar power. You have to be rolfing roofies to think mandated rooftop solar makes any sense. MIT’s Technology Review notes: “The new rule »

Wonderful evening last night in Denver at the annual Founders’ Dinner for the Independence Institute, the conservative think tank of Colorado. It was great to see some Power Line readers and old friends from my time as an inmate at Boulder. The Institute’s president, the colorful John Caldara (other adjectives in addition to “colorful” come to mind when you think of John) invited me to participate in the program to »

If you’re an old-timer like me, cast your mind back to the tax reform of 1986, which was passed on a bipartisan basis, because Democrats understood the logic of tax simplification and cutting rates down to a lower level with a broader base. There’s one detail everyone has forgotten that is relevant today: President Reagan’s initial tax reform proposal included elimination the state and local income tax deduction. Pro-tax reform »

In today’s installment of California Crazy, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (better known as “Governor Girly-Man“) has announced that he, too, intends to sue major major oil companies for “knowingly killing people all over the world.” Let’s see: this would be the same Schwarzenegger who agitated to have a mass-market consumer version of the Humvee after Gulf War 1? The same Schwarzenegger who used to fly back and forth from his »

Steve has been writing about California’s suicide attempt, most recently here and here. There can’t have been many places in world history blessed with as many natural advantages as California, but that state’s far-left governing class is rapidly destroying its seemingly invincible heritage. Michael Ramirez tells the story in graphic form (click to enlarge). It is hard to foresee a happy ending for California: »

Really, the situation in California requires very little commentary or analysis. Just reporting the news does all the work for you. • OC Homeless Camp Cleanup: 400+ Tons Of Debris, Nearly 14,000 Needles, 5,300 Pounds Of Human Waste ANAHEIM (CBSLA/AP) — The Orange County Public Works department says 404 tons of debris has been removed from a former homeless encampment where more than 700 people lived until they were recently moved »

The great thing about being a liberal is that it is an endlessly adaptable creed. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when white people moved to the suburbs and urban cores deterioration, it was called “white flight,” and the left decried it as racist, etc. But now that affluent whites have moved back into the urban cores, it is called “gentrification,” and it is terrible because it ruins old neighborhoods »

With even the Los Angeles Times asking in an editorial, “How Can a Place with 58,000 Homeless People Continue to Function?“, perhaps it is worth looking back a hundred years or so to this section of California’s 1916 state budget, which proposed establishing a “Lunacy Commission” and a “Deportation Bureau” to send “insane” people back to their home states. The first line of the second paragraph below, in case you »

The conventional wisdom about the near-collapse of the Republican Party in California is that Proposition 187 in 1994 doomed the party with Latino voters. Prop. 187 sought to bar illegal immigrants from eligibility for state social services; it passed by a comfortable margin and was struck down in federal court. I’ve long harbored doubts about this theme, in part because of how it is used as a cudgel against Republicans »

Last we checked in on California circling the drain (which I’m rechristening here as our “California Suicide Watch”), we passed along the story of Sharky Laguana (yes, that’s his real name) and his frustration with the San Francisco police who were unwilling to lend him any assistance to recover a van stolen from his rental fleet. I don’t know whether our mention helped or not (Sharky’s tweetstorm went viral), but »

I recently became a crime victim for one of the few times in my life. My car was burgled while I was up in the Bay Area on my weekly sojourn to the Peoples Republic of Berkeley. I say “burgled” rather than “broken into,” because there was no smashed window, or picked lock, nor did I leave the car unlocked. Rather, I was the victim of a clever gang of »